October 28, 2012

It was a luminous autumn day, cloudless, in late September. It must have been one of thelast weekends before the school year started in earnest, one of the last lazy weekends thatTom and I, both of us eighth graders, were to spend at the cabin. I was going to say thatit was one I’d never forget. But I did forget. For decades, I had forgotten. I thought ofTom this morning for the first time in years. The cabin, surrounded by miles of Michigan wilderness, was a nice piece of familyweekend and summer real estate, outings to which I divided amongst my three closestfriends, Barry, Ken, and Tom, according to a metric that is lost to me now, most likelyTom’s availability. Of the three Tom was the brightest, the most fearless, the mostdoomed. My imagination found a playmate in his courage. There was scarcely a dare hewould not take, but with the smarts to deftly turn the tables on, if I took it too far. Wemade crank phone calls. We philosophied and opined. We filched cigarettes. Tom was astraight-A achiever. I was an artsy prodigy and a mediocre student whom teachers liked. An intimacy sprang up between us that I kept instinctively, if salaciously, cloaked, butwhich he, simply for the sake of arousing my chagrin, would unexpectedly, and publicly,flaunt with a kiss or a grope that turned my ears to stoplights.A city boy, Tom was enchanted with all the country things, boats, guns, field and stream,that I took for granted. Those country weekends were a kind of manful world unlike Tomhad known. A world wherein two fourteen year old boys were allowed set off for a trampin the woods with .22 rifles, and the trust of adults that made him practically throb withpride - and assume a sense of responsibility almost querulous in its propriety. In return,his incipient thrill-seeking often catalyzed the surroundings, so familiar to me, into aframework for adventure. Those were days when youngsters, though much less indulged,enjoyed in many significant ways, more freedom. One summer Tom suggested that we take the boat, a little wooden two-seater, all the wayupstream to the “big lake”, which he had heard me talk about, but which expedition onlymy older brother had heretofore pulled off, and alone. Of course Jack’s cautionaryaccount, complete with water moccasins and strange cries heard among the cattails, onlywhetted Tom’s appetite. We announced our intention at dinner that night. By morning mymother, always a trooper at hiding her maternal misgivings, packed a paper bag ofsandwiches. My dad informed us that if we came a cropper, my brother would get my lifeinsurance. Three hours later we were casting lines into the lake, under postcard summerskies. When the buckets were full of perch we started back home. That was when we wereconfronted with a handful of inlets which we realized were impossible to tell apart. Wepicked the most likely and within an hour, and under deepening skies, we found ourselvesin an unfamiliar, and inexorably narrowing stream, and soon a thorny tunnel scarcelywider than the boat, choked with bramble, our skin poked, scratched, and mosquito-bitten.A treacherously rocky riverbed sheared the outboard’s cotter pin, rendering the propelleruseless. We clawed our way along with the oars. I don’t remember any of theconversation, but it probably went something like“Oh, shit.”“Heh, heh… yeah.”I remember Tom’s now-we’re-in-for-it grin. I suspect it was a lot like mine. Striplingcommandos we were, confronted with nature’s heart of darkness, if not our own. Wemade it home, miraculously, by dinner. The only thing we admitted to was the brokencotter pin, for which I received a paternal lecture and a garnished allowance. My mothereyed our scratches with suspicion, but was disinclined to press the matter. We feasted onlake perch. My brother, spookily astute as usual, made sly references to the “road not taken,”about a poem he claimed to be reading.We were down at the stream fishing one autumn day, casting night crawlers off thebridge, not far from a treacherous curve in the road that the local folk had long agodubbed The Devil's Elbow. It was flanked on both sides by a marsh, a peat bog, really,thought to be all but bottomless. It was said to have swallowed, over the years, quite anumber of cars, families, pets, and lovers, all sucked to their doom who paid too littlerespect to the hairpin curve. Once in a rare while, a tow truck would show up, hauling outsome car or pickup truck, dripping with black muck. Those were the lucky few that hadgone in right next to the road. Many others, it was assumed, were out there in the bog,travelers, passing through this remote country, never located nor seen again.

The Devil's Elbow, on Stockbridge Road, had a creepy desolation about it. Tom,although more daring than I, showed little interest in exploring the area, beyond our firstand last hike past the oddly still twist, not far from our habitual fishing hole at the bridge.As we stood casting for sunfish and blue gill in the stream that day, lost in our ownthoughts, we heard the familiar soft crunch of distant gravel and turned to look down theroad, past the Elbow, for the approaching vehicle. The crunch of tire on gravel grewlouder but the usual cloud of dust, the visible herald of what our ears told us we wouldsoon see, was oddly absent. Then suddenly rounding the feral curve came an old redpickup, of some throwback vintage that neither of us had seen before. We heard themusic, coming from the truck's radio. It stuck in my mind for some reason - an old bigband rendition of Little Brown Jug. As the truck passed, we glimpsed a young family,mom and dad in the cab, two boys and a dog in the back. It strikes me now, as I write this, as it could hardly have occurred to me then, howcomprehensively one can discern a complete emotional dynamic in a passing glimpse. Theman was laughing behind the wheel, while the woman stared straight ahead, unamused.There was something a little mocking about that laugh, heedless. The woman’s stonysilence looked deeply etched. Neither the elder boy nor the dog seemed to notice us in theleast. Only the young boy looked at us as the truck sped by. I remember every detail abouthim. The baseball cap, red, with a yellow ear of corn, half-shucked, on a logo advertisingPicknell’s General Store. The tattered white shirt, with its bone-colored buttons, short-sleeved, frayed at the collar. His cornflower-blue eyes. His gaze was fixed on Tom as thetruck careened past the bridge, nearly driving off the road. A gaze of the utmostcompassion, little brows knitted, a soul crying out from some deeply timeless place for anexplanation… an answer…We watched the truck disappear among the far trees, its passage still weirdly unmarked bythe cloud of dust to which we are said, when all is said and done, to return. “That was weird,” said Tom. “Yeah, man…” I said. And that was all that was said. Andthat, it turned out, would be our last weekend together at the cottage, or anywhere else.School intervened. Other voices, other rooms. By the next year the friendship that seemedbeyond a second thought, like the hill on which the cottage stood, had vanished in a cloudof noise, new friends, rivalries and dust. Tom fell in with some old friends from the city.Sagacious, street-wise friends. Friends who had no use for stream-fed idylls or the vileaffections that were rumored to be turning him queer. He faltered academically the nextyear. He was in and out of trouble. In high school he was suspended for smoking in theparking lot and mouthing off to the civics teacher who caught him. The cocky brilliancethat made him a leader in grade school, was informing his delinquency now. Or so we’dheard. After his suspension, he never returned. For my part, new friends, new pursuits,closed in around his memory, until it was clammed away with my broken heart. I learnedfrom Barry, over breakfast at Denny’s years later on one of my rare visits to Michigan,that Tom had been killed in a car crash, years ago, coked to the eyebrows, on MiddlebeltRoad on Halloween. Hearing that, I stood up and bawled. While a discretely unobtrusivespeaker somewhere played Bobby McFerrin singing Don’t Worry Be Happy, I cried myheart out.

October 17, 2012

October 14, 2012

October 10, 2012

October 7, 2012

I sat down at a sidewalk table at Starbucks and this girl was reading aloud from a newspaper to her two friends, college kids I would guess. It was some inane story about city council deliberations. But she was reading in a voice dripping with contempt and sarcasm, rendering the content hilarious. Think Angela Hayes in American Beauty describing Ricky Fitts to Jane Burnham. Her friends were laughing. People were auditing. I sipped my cappuccino and was entertained.